I think you might be too harsh here. I think the point of an 11 minute presentation video isn't to be an explanation of an entire thesis but just to raise some concerns to provoke some thought on the fundamental structure of education. In my opinion, people spend too much focusing on whether or not teachers and the teacher union is being payed too much and if it is undermining the government from being able to help the students. That discussion obviously isn't the end all for the education problem but people need a scapegoat and the Teach. Union serves as a convenient one to distract people from the real problems.
I object to his intellectual dishonesty and glossy style. I do think most people focus too much on the teachers, it seems plausible to me that kids whose parents make them do their work do well in school regardless. Well enough to get to college and take charge of things themselves.

I don't think this guy is out to manipulate the data to try and get "his" way.
He did.



This is an actual map of prevalence of diagnosis.



This is his map. It is actually labeled "map of prescriptions", but he fooled me on that by the way he talked about it. He talks about "instances of adhd earlier" and says that "adhd increases as you travel east across the country".

I'm not even sure what his argument based on the manipulated version is. Do those states have more standardized testing? Huh? Maybe he should show a map of africa and say that there are no instances of adhd there, thus adhd is fictitious (if he's qualified to say that of course).

Kids with adhd can have trouble finishing sentences, let alone assignments.

Regarding him saying he isn't qualified, i think that just means to take what he says with a grain of salt, but his hypothesis might have some good insight in it for us to consider. Regarding epidemic...hmm you are technically correct, but nowadays people always use it in the context of how he used it. "Obesity is now an epidemic among Americans!!!"
He said he isn't qualified to say "there's no such thing as adhd". Psychologists "think there is such a thing...though it's still a matter of debate". He "knows for a fact that it's not an epidemic". And then that "they are being medicated on a whimsical basis--medical fashion".

See? There's obviously such a thing as adhd, but he isn't qualified to say that. He is qualified to make a fluff statement about it not being an epidemic, and apparently to dismiss it as medical fashion.

Capitalism and industry needs more then just workers with the bare minimum of knowledge to become functional workers. Let those naturally not as creative or intelligent to take up the lower roles and promote those more naturally gifted to become the new leaders of industry and innovators. The current system treats everyone as a worker and expects those naturally talented to rise from the muck with the expectation that they will get the "good" life if they do. But as he said in the video, a degree is not a guarantee of a "good" life, so this incentive is gone and the system no longer functions the way it is supposed to.
Tbh, besides the uniformity of the curriculum being taught I don't see how modeling schools after factories is good. Perhaps you have put more thought into this and have figured out why such a statement is to be dismissed instead of agreed with.
Having seen a bunch of TED videos, I'm confidant in saying that any comparison to factories and capitalism is very persuasive to his audience. So much so that he doesn't do anything more than that. It's like if someone from the religious right started off by saying to their congregation that the schools were areligious and thus like an "atheist church" due to separation of church and state.

I think montessori makes plenty of sense (went to one) for many kids (not all). But comparing the bell to end class with the bells in a factory is a flimsy rhetorical criticism.

A bit of an exaggeration, but yeah he was vague about it. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he meant that we should be integrating the subjects when it enhances the learning. I am about to start a class on the history of mathematics. That kind of thing is never even talked about in high school at least for me. There was history and there was math. In math you learned about math, even though you might argue that learning the origins of it could give you a greater perspective on the subject matter.

EDIT: hell, my calculus professor last quarter at least took 4-5 minutes each lecture just to briefly go over the people whose names are attributed to certain theorems and laws. I liked that a lot.
We had our history and english classes link up a couple of years. But that just meant we had to read Johnny Tremain. Anyway, "integrating the different fields" is something that people love to say vaguely and earnestly.

Creativity is the ability to arrive at your destination in a way that is not readily apparent to the person being tasked or to third party outsiders watching from the outside. That's the best definition I can come up with, and I think you could conceive a test to measure this in varying degrees although it would take some...creativity to design it.
I mean, the proof is in the pudding I suppose. People who make great designs are creative. But that isn't a test like the IQ test is. In any case, I doubt the NASA test measures it in any significant way.

I agree but I don't think we should be stumbling in the dark. We need some sort of measurement or test to go off on, no matter how weak, otherwise we are just going off what we "feel" might be the right direction.
No. Ignore tests unless we have some reason to think they are useful. They can be worse than useless. Remember all those tests the financial institutions had before the crash?

We can barely test intelligence and academic ability adequately. Now imagine we had no reason to think the SAT test was good, but you wanted college admissions to be based on it.

Creativity all depends on the subject and the teacher to a large degree. A physics class can be the most creative class you can take in high school or it can be the most insanely boring and difficult class based around memorizing equations and laws. The teacher really makes it or breaks it at some point.
Yes, they do.

Depends on your perspective. Obviously in the 9 to 5 office, "collaboration" will take on a different meaning then in academic or scientific groups.
It never means getting all the answers from someone else, not doing any work, and not understanding what you're doing. That was a particularly ridiculous remark by him, considering every class and it's mother has group work.

And what the hell is he suggesting? He ends with something about how we don't learn when we're alone (!?) and how we need to change the habits etc of the schools. But all he did was describe them and imply they were bad and use some crappy data about adhd and some nasa test. It's always possible that a flawed system is better than any conceivable alternative.

I would be interested in an argument for making the majority of gradeschools montessori. I've read interesting arguments about how colleges should be reformed. This guy gives me nothing but smarmy dishonesty.